Seesmic

Last week, Loic sent me an invitation code to try Seesmic, his new venture, here in San Francisco. First I’d like to say that I think Loic has been very courageous to move all his family, here in California and to start a new business from scratch! I am almost sure that he is not doing it for the money…

Some said that Seesmic is actually a “video twitter“, but I also think -and hope- that it is going to be more than this: my guess is that Loic is very pragmatic and relies a lot on his “community” to build the service, I would then expect to see Seesmic’s baseline and functionalities evolve in the next weeks. To be a little more technical, I would say that Seesmic is a video asynchronous many-to-many communication tool. It’s actually the first medium of this type!

1. Asyncrhonous means that Seesmer’s don’t need to be connected and the same time to interract. I can post a video now, that will be see tomorow by someone else… Twitter is asynchronous, MSN Messenger is not. Mail is asynchronous, IRC is not… you got the picture!
2. Video, well that’s pretty clear, huh? It means sound and image. Do I need to give examples?
3. Many-to-many is maybe the most interesting part : it means that my message is not dedicated to someone special, but rather to a group of persons (my friends, my network, or even everybody!). It doesn’t mean that I am not talking to someone in particular, but it means that many people can actually be listening/watching to our conversation. Telephone is historically one-to-one, TV is one-to-many, conference calls are many-to-many, but they are synchronous!

How am I using Seemics today? As a place where I can ask questions and get answers easily and quicker than Yahoo! Answers and by people that I know… and it is also a place for debate or promotion.

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